In The News - 9/26/2024
The Spokesman Review
HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM
COULD SPOKANE FIX ITS HOMELESS CRISIS BY FOLLOWING THE TEXAS CITY’S LEAD? FORMER MAYOR WHO LED ITS PROGRESS SHARES HARD-WON LESSONS
A strong mayor willing to be accountable but unwilling to cede control; a business community willing to back her vision; an infusion of federal cash and buy-in from philanthropists; and housing – lots and lots of housing.
These were some of the insights brought to Spokane on Tuesday by former Houston Mayor Annise Parker, whose success in radically reforming that city’s approach to homelessness has earned her accolades and the attention of cities nationwide.
Two years ago, Spokane political, business and community leaders traveled to Houston to learn that city’s secret sauce for addressing homelessness and see if it could be replicated in the Inland Empire.
Those efforts have been halting, and political differences have seemingly deepened.
But some saw a ray of hope Tuesday as many of the same local leaders, or in some cases their successors, gathered in a Spokane ballroom to listen to Parker.
In an event hosted by Hello for Good, a business coalition created by Washington Trust Bank in 2021 to address homelessness, Parker highlighted the keys to Houston’s success and the challenges she faced, and in so doing underscored areas where Spokane has closely followed Houston and areas where it has sharply diverged from Space City.
Shortly before Parker was elected mayor in 2012, Houston faced a major budget deficit and had to slash services and lay off hundreds of city staff, financial troubles that echo difficult decisions facing Spokane’s leaders today.
Despite this, without assistance from the state and almost entirely without new local taxes for homeless services, she managed in six years to create a system that to date has housed more than 32,000 largely by reorganizing existing federal dollars and with the backing of philanthropic heavyweight Houston Endowment.
Houston today has the lowest rate of homelessness of any large city in the country, less than one for every 1,000 people; local homeless data reporting makes it difficult to say what Spokane’s rate of homelessness is, but countywide it’s closer to four out of every 1,000.
A lot of this came down to coordination of service providers and “brute force” over who got federal funding for what purposes, Parker said Tuesday.
“I’m controlling federal dollars, and I’m going to move the dollars to the agencies that are most efficient with it,” she said. “That’s the brute force, like a two-by-four upside the head.”
Under former Mayor Nadine Woodward, one of the cornerstone efforts to replicate the “Houston model” was creating a regional homeless authority that would bring area governments and nonprofits together in the same board room, eliminating redundancies and sharing responsibility for effectively coordinating federal and state money for homeless initiatives.
There was initially momentum to form this entity, which organizers hoped would eliminate politics from how local governments handled home-lessness, but those efforts quickly ran into a political brick wall amid pushback from service providers and mistrust over how the regional authority would be governed.
Rearranging deck chairs for homeless won’t work
SUE LANI MADSEN SPOKESMAN COLUMNIST
Titanic accurately describes the size of the homelessness problem in all major cities, but a sinking ship is an unusual analogy for highlighting success in managing urban homelessness.
Former Houston Mayor Annise Parker used the tragedy of the Titanic to describe the shift in mindset behind her approach to the challenge.
Parker was in Spokane to speak to community leaders at the Hello for Good Fall Symposium this week. While Houston did some prevention and management on homelessness issues, Parker’s focus Tuesday morning was on the city’s work to make sure the system was operating efficiently and effectively.
Preventing someone from slipping into homelessness is simple, if anything about such a complex situation can be called simple. Building more housing and helping fragile households stay housed are relatively straightforward compared to supporting those floundering and in need of a lifeboat.
When the Titanic hit the iceberg in 1912, there were less than 1,200 seats in lifeboats and just more than 2,200 people on board. A high death toll was inevitable, but the tragedy was the number of seats that went unfilled. Only about 700 people were rescued from lifeboats and the rest of the capacity was wasted.
At a gathering of community partners in Houston, Parker saw agencies and people who cared, all operating separately and failing to converge to make progress. Politics and personalities got in the way of collaboration and coordination. All the outreach, all the shelters, all the transitional housing had their own intake systems. People drowned in the gap between street level contact and progress to permanent housing.
Parker focused Houston’s attention on filling the lifeboats. “People would spend days bouncing around in the system before somebody could find them and re-engage,” said Parker to the Hello for Good audience. The key was the coordinated access system.